I have been searching for the “perfect” media front end for a long time. After all this time I am realizing that my usage patterns for the front end are at odds with the design of most media servers.
My first introduction to a media system was TIVO which was designed with the idea that content is disposable, you view it once or twice and then move on to the next item. In the world of broadcast television that makes perfect sense. The medium is designed to be dynamic and ever changing. This is completely different from how you would build and manager a DVD collection. Which are an investment you make into continued enjoyment of the same content.
I am broadly categorizing these 2 patterns into content consumption or collection.
There is thread on the general board about the place for deletion of content within Plex. This is a great illustration of the different requirements of each pattern. A collector sees file deletion as an assault on a carefully crafted library of content. While a consumer uses deletion as a normal part of the usage cycle. The direction of that thread scared me a little that my consumption based usage was at risk in Plex.
Consumption is where Plex can shine. It already has great library options for the collection of DVDs and downloaded TV shows. When searching for a DVD the user doesn’t care which source has any particular DVD file, just that it is presented in the library and can be played. Similarly when a user is looking for new content to consume he doesn’t care about where it comes from directly (could be Hulu, MythTV, etc) just that there is new unwatched content ready to be consumed. Then after it is consumed it can be discarded.
I believe the evolution of Plex is to consume all its content from within a library and not from the sources itself. Currently it is half library and half files from watch your videos blade. After a user sets up a source for The Daily Show on Hulu any new episodes for that should automatically show up in watch your tv shows library. Sources would need to be monitored for changes and the library would need to be smart enough to remember the difference between something that was deleted and something that is new.
In the short term I plan on working to get MythTV into the watch your tv shows blade to satisfy my watch a show and delete usage.
Jeremy
I don't think there is any reason that Plex can't do both... currently deletion functions can all be switched on or off with a parameter in advancedprefs.xml and I haven't heard any talk of this changing.
I'd say with the exception of the recently added plugins/streaming content (which are still a work in progress), that this evolution is complete.
Apart from the very occasional hack'n'scratch type thing, I don't watch anything through "Watch my videos"... I have scraped movies and scraped tv shows and I watch them both through their respective library modes. I guess if I had home videos or something I might watch them through "Watch my videos", but that is about it. Even then, they'd be possible to slurp into library mode through nfo files, and while this process could certainly be made easier, it, by its nature, needs to be a fairly manual process for the user.
What sort of videos do you watch through "Watch my videos?"
I'm not sure how this tied in with the above... however, you have pointed out the one major content/functionality hole in Plex (which doesn't bother me at all, but it does hold some people I know back from adopting it) which is the lack of ability to handle live tv (recording, watching etc). There is an Eyetv plugin in the works, but I don't know exactly what functionality this will have (just play recordings? Something more?).
I enjoyed your post... you are quite right, there definitely are 2 different modes of use out there, something which hadn't occurred to me before (I am a horder :))
I believe it should do both. What I was attempting to describe was a happy paradise where Plex is able to fulfill both roles. One way to ease the delete problem is to flag difference sources as collections or transient producers, then tune the delete behavior accordingly.
Then I must be missing a way of using Plex. I couldn't find a way to get "set content" type library behavior with tv episodes in a Hulu or MythTV source. The library behavior seems complete for file based sources where filename can be parsed and then the library information scrapped from an online source. When the meta data for a library entry comes from the source itself the link seems to be missing.
Jeremy
Yeah - I see your point... implementing what you suggest would be to complicate the UI further though, which may be reason enough not to - thankfully, greater minds than mine dwell on these points :)
You are correct there.. the plugins system is newly implemented and from the sounds of it, there are numerous improvements coming to the UI there.
As for mythtv, I actually came across from Myth to Plex and have dumped myth altogether - I've no need for live tv or recording, but that is just me, and there does seem to be a huge part of the Plex community calling for it. My understanding is that the mythtv plugin is still a hack/early alpha, and if it gets slurped into the releases, or if it evolves as a plugin, then I'd expect to see the library functionality you mention. There are some comments on the mythtv plugin here [http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php?showtopic=582](http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php?showtopic=582)
My feeling is (and it is just a feeling - I'm not privy to these things) that the main focus at the moment for this sort of stuff will be the EyeTV functionality. I'd be curious to hear what one of the devs has to say on the matter - having some idea of the future direction of this stuff may have a significant impact on the media centre design and hardware purchasing decisions people are making now. The EyeTV bug is here if you'd like to follow it [http://plexapp.lighthouseapp.com/projects/...etv-integration](http://plexapp.lighthouseapp.com/projects/14382/tickets/146-eyetv-integration)
I did a bit more hunting on mythtv just then are there is certainly some dev activity on it ... [http://plexapp.lighthouseapp.com/projects/...ve-myth-support](http://plexapp.lighthouseapp.com/projects/14382/tickets/14-native-myth-support) (and there's a request for the first step towards what you ask for [http://plexapp.lighthouseapp.com/projects/...tv-xbmc-update)](http://plexapp.lighthouseapp.com/projects/14382/tickets/259-mythtv-xbmc-update)) - but I'm still left with the feeling that EyeTV is the main dev push.
MythTV .021-fixes works in Plex. Live TV has terrible usability and channel surfing is out of the question in the current design, but it does work.
I investigated XBMC and the additions they did for myth:// sources. They added another top level directory in the source that presented a different listing of the programs instead of just all in one big pile. It is a nice step that makes the raw source easier to use, but it ultimately will still be lacking. As long as access to the content is thru watch your videos there will always be more than one place to check for new content. So I am latching onto the idea that all source content should be in the library some place so there is only 1 (well if you assume that one place for movies, pictures, tv shows is still 1 place) to look for new stuff.
With 5 tuners I have too much invested in to switch to EyeTV. But since I am a programmer I can bend things to my liking if they are close, Plex is very close. If other devs get live TV watching usable or some great library integration for EyeTV before I can, then it is just a matter of adapting that to MythTV.
Jeremy
I looked into some possibilities as well. Here are my comments, crossposted from [another thread](http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php?app=forums&module=post§ion=post&do=reply_post&f=3&t=2202&qpid=60063).
MythTV just went to a release candidate of version 0.22, which is an excellent reason to resurrect this topic. I've had one of the [intermediate builds](http://www.thesniderpad.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42) running smoothly on my 2009 Mac Mini since the [spring](http://public.boonstra.org/MacMiniHTPCSetup.html).
It appears to me that Plex can serve as a commercial-skipping frontend using uPnP if MythTV ever resolves [Issue 3580](http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/3580) for skipping in [uPnP](http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/UPnP) playback. It's an old ticket so I am not holding my breath.
I have not managed to get Plex working as a uPnP client to Myth so far...has anyone else done so?
I would also like to call everyone's attention to [MythFS](http://fokke.org/site/mythfs) which causes recordings to appear as a locally mounted filesystem. Commercial skipping would be possible if Plex's ffmpeg could be induced to work with, say, an [EDL](http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/edl.html) skiplist as [found in the database](http://www.outflux.net/blog/archives/2006/08/02/mythtv-cutlist-to-mplayer-edl-file/) or as given by the [-genskiplist option of Mythcommflag](http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythcommflag).
Finally, MythTV itself offers [Python bindings](http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Python_bindings) encapsulating the ability to control the front end via a [socket interface](http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Telnet_socket), and they appear to be [actively maintained](http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-commits/2009-July/053780.html). I don't know enough about Plex video to say whether it is willing to give up control of the main video screen to MythFrontend in a compatible way, but if it is then this becomes a pretty future-proof means of getting good playback.
Note that this is different from the [nonfunctional](http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php?showtopic=3945&view=findpost&p=27334) [mythbox](http://code.google.com/p/mythbox/) scripts that others have discussed, and which seem [unlikely](https://plexapp.lighthouseapp.com/projects/15067/tickets/332-python-scripts-which-use-xbmclanguage-broken) to ever be supported by Plex.
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